[PHOTO] Looking up at the Royal York Hotel from Union Station, Toronto

As seen from below and the east, the Royal York Hotel looks almost as imposing as it must have when it was first built.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about the importance of people who believe in you.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a surge in gun sales after the San Bernardino shooting.


• Joe. My. God. and Towleroad write about ending PrEP profiteering.


• Language Hat talks about Mancunianisms.


• Language Log describes the odd but evocative language used to talk about pollution on Chinese social networks.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money seems unduly wedded to Venezuela's Chavismo.


• Justin Petrone talks about how compact the Baltic States actually are.


• Transit Toronto talks about the 1995 retirement of the PCC streetcar.


• Window on Eurasia is not hopeful about the consequences for a breakdown of the Putin consensus and speculates about the future of Russian statehood in the light of Soviet dissolution.

[URBAN NOTE] "Torontoist Explains: The Municipal Land Transfer Tax"

Torontoist's Neville Park explains, at length, Toronto's controversial municipal land transfer tax. Briefly put, it's one of the few revenue tools Toronto has.

If you ever want to rustle a real estate agent’s jimmies, then all you need to do is mention the municipal land transfer tax. First implemented in 2008, the tax on Toronto real estate transactions is greatly disliked by the real estate industry. But it’s also an increasingly vital part of the City’s precarious budgeting act.

Here’s how the land transfer tax works, why some people are hopping mad about it, and why it’s not going away.

The Basics

Torontonians are occasionally guilty of a champagne taste on a beer budget. Partly it’s because we want expensive, world-class things, like subways, while preserving our storied Orange Order thriftiness. But it’s also because provincial legislation limits the ways the City can raise revenue. Unlike other major North American cities, Toronto is prohibited from taxing income, fuel, or sales; nor can we tax hospitals, school boards, or colleges and universities.

So what can we tax? For those of you just joining us:
•Property taxes;
•the late vehicle registration tax;
•road tolls or a congestion tax;
•parking tax;1
•sales taxes on liquor and cigarettes;
•an “entertainment tax” on the price of admission to venues;
•a billboard tax;
•and the star of today’s show, the municipal land transfer tax, or MLTT.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto's Trump Tower should change its name says city councillor"

As I said in a Facebook group, I want the fucker's name out of my city. blogTO first reported on the call by Josh Matlow to change the name of the tower, and CP24 went into more detail.

A local city councillor wants to see Donald Trump’s name taken off of Trump Tower in Toronto.

Ward 22 Coun. Josh Matlow told CP24 that in light of Trump's recent call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, Toronto should disassociate itself from the Trump brand altogether.

“He is one of the leading contenders to become president of the United States and over the past while, he has not only compared Mexicans to rapists and criminals but more recently, he has made a public policy proposal that all Muslims should be banned from immigration to the United States," Matlow told CP24 Tuesday afternoon.

"We live in the most diverse and multicultural city in the world, or at least one of them, and I just think now that we know who Donald Trump is and we know what kind of policies he is proposing, it is time for us to disassociate ourselves but ultimately it will be up to the owners of the building to make their choice."

[URBAN NOTE] blogTO on the history of Commerce Court North

blogTO's Derek Flack wrote about Toronto's first skyscraper, Commerce Court North. (Torontoist talked about it in May 2008.)

The Toronto skyline was born at the outset of the 1930s. Up until then, the view of the city from a ship entering the harbour was one of church steeples and a handful of buildings that rose over 10 storeys. At the time, Toronto didn't boast a single true skyscraper.

In 1929, the Royal York Hotel made its mark at 28 storeys, briefly bearing the crown of the tallest building in the British Empire before the headquarters of the Canadian Bank of Commerce took the mantle at 34-storeys just a year later. It would hold onto that designation all the way until 1962.

The Toronto skyline was born at the outset of the 1930s. Up until then, the view of the city from a ship entering the harbour was one of church steeples and a handful of buildings that rose over 10 storeys. At the time, Toronto didn't boast a single true skyscraper.

In 1929, the Royal York Hotel made its mark at 28 storeys, briefly bearing the crown of the tallest building in the British Empire before the headquarters of the Canadian Bank of Commerce took the mantle at 34-storeys just a year later. It would hold onto that designation all the way until 1962.

We now refer to this building as Commerce Court North, the oldest part of a complex of office towers that also includes I.M. Pei's understated but lovely Commerce Court West at 57 storeys. The prominent spot on the skyline that our first true skyscraper once enjoyed has been mostly lost to modern structures, but few would argue against the idea that it remains one of our most beautiful buildings.

More, including lovely photos, at the site.

[URBAN NOTE] "How about food bikes?"

Spacing Toronto's Dylan Reid writes about the idea of food bikes in Toronto.

This spring, I was fortunate to be able to spend a few days in Paris. The city is in the midst of trying to reclaim the banks of the Seine river as public space (rather than abandoned industrial or vehicle traffic space). On one low-lying outcropping the city had built a simple park with chairs (awesome chairs — see photo below) — and in that park was a food bike, selling fantastic sandwiches.

My thought, of course, was, could we have food bikes in Toronto? Apart from the wow factor, the concept has several advantages. They are temporary, emissions-free, and mobile. Bikes can reach places vehicles would have a hard time with: the Paris park was only accessible by a ramp, more easily maneouvered by a bike than a vehicle. The park was a bit out of the way, but a food bike has lower overhead than a truck or a full food stand, so doesn’t have to sell as much to make money. And a food bike is temporary, so it doesn’t even have to open at times when no-one will be around, or can go to different locations depending on demand. It doesn’t need to run a motor, so its emissions are far lower than a food truck, and lower too than a food stand that has to be brought in and out by motor vehicle.

[LINK] "Columbia engineers build biologically powered chip"

The Dragon's Tales linked to the Eurekaalert note about remarkable computer technology.

Columbia Engineering researchers have, for the first time, harnessed the molecular machinery of living systems to power an integrated circuit from adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life. They achieved this by integrating a conventional solid-state complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit with an artificial lipid bilayer membrane containing ATP-powered ion pumps, opening the door to creating entirely new artificial systems that contain both biological and solid-state components. The study, led by Ken Shepard, Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, is published online Dec. 7 in Nature Communications.

"In combining a biological electronic device with CMOS, we will be able to create new systems not possible with either technology alone," says Shepard. "We are excited at the prospect of expanding the palette of active devices that will have new functions, such as harvesting energy from ATP, as was done here, or recognizing specific molecules, giving chips the potential to taste and smell. This was quite a unique new direction for us and it has great potential to give solid-state systems new capabilities with biological components."

Shepard, whose lab is a leader in the development of engineered solid-state systems interfaced to biological systems, notes that despite its overwhelming success, CMOS solid-state electronics is incapable of replicating certain functions natural to living systems, such as the senses of taste and smell and the use of biochemical energy sources. Living systems achieve this functionality with their own version of electronics based on lipid membranes and ion channels and pumps, which act as a kind of 'biological transistor.' They use charge in the form of ions to carry energy and information -- ion channels control the flow of ions across cell membranes. Solid-state systems, such as those in computers and communication devices, use electrons; their electronic signaling and power are controlled by field-effect transistors.

In living systems, energy is stored in potentials across lipid membranes, in this case created through the action of ion pumps. ATP is used to transport energy from where it is generated to where it is consumed in the cell. To build a prototype of their hybrid system, Shepard's team, led by PhD student Jared Roseman, packaged a CMOS integrated circuit (IC) with an ATP-harvesting 'biocell.' In the presence of ATP, the system pumped ions across the membrane, producing an electrical potential harvested by the IC.

[LINK] "Supermajority or Not, in Venezuela It's Still About Oil Prices"

Bloomberg's Nathan Crooks writes about how, whatever the political regime, Venezuela depends on oil excessively.

Just when it looked like change was coming to Venezuela, along came OPEC to spoil the party.

Celebrations were still taking place in Caracas in the aftermath of elections Sunday that saw opposition lawmakers win a majority in congress for the first time in 16 years, but optimism over the prospect of a challenge to President Nicolas Maduro’s government has started to fizzle out as Brent crude fell below $40 a barrel for the first time since 2009.

With oil accounting for 95 percent of Venezuela’s foreign-currency earnings, the drop in crude prices is threatening to push the country’s fragile economy deeper into recession.

Venezuela’s economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year by the International Monetary Fund, while economists polled by Bloomberg see consumer prices rising about 124 percent. While the result of Sunday’s National Assembly election is the “best possible outcome,” optimism is fading as low oil prices start to stress the country’s near-term cashflow, Siobhan Morden, the head of Latin America fixed-income strategy at Nomura Holdings Inc., said Tuesday in a note.

“Fiscal accounts are completely dependent on oil,” said Francisco Monaldi, a fellow in Latin American energy policy at the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston, adding that the break-even point for many new oil-related investments is about $30 a barrel.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Northern Powerhouse as ‘Real Mirage’"

Open Democracy's Steve Hanson writes about the uneasy archipelagic structure of the cities and regions of the United Kingdom.

The ‘new north-south split’ was perhaps the most popular remapping exercise, particularly across social media, after May 7th. Manchester flared up as a rebellious northern city, ready to ballot its citizens to leave the union and join with its fiercer, more socialist neighbours further north up to the top of the island.

Suddenly, the ‘north of Watford’ cliché was pushed up to divide the island in half, redrawing the M62 as the new Hadrian’s Wall, from the mouth of the Humber to the Mersey Estuary, red above and blue below. The north-south divide is not a new concept. It has just become foregrounded.

A Fata Morgana is a mirage, a physical form seen out at sea, which turns out to be an illusion. Our island is a Fata Morgana. This is not just what Britain is in our globalised present, it is what Britain has always been.

Appropriately, ‘Fata Morgana’ refers to very real mirages, seen in the Strait of Messina, thought to be ‘fata’ or ‘fairy’ castles, luring sailors to their deaths. These mirages were named after the Arthurian enchantress, Morgan le Fay. I want to look at Fata Morgana in dialectical terms, as the ‘real mirage’, which is perhaps the ultimate Hegelian ‘contradiction embodied’.

Fredric Jameson’s ‘cognitive map’ also usefully describes my intentions here. Jameson explains his form of mapping as essentially aesthetic. It is not meant to map a full totality literally – although Jameson does mean a map in the orthodox cartographic sense – but it can provide a vantage point. It is a tool to help make connections between what seem like disparate spaces and times, to begin to join up the occulted macrologistics of globalization.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Look at Toronto’s Real Estate Developers"

Stefan Novakovic's Torontoist article provides readers with a nice overview of the major companies currently engaged in transforming the city.

A decade into Toronto’s unprecedented construction boom, new and transformed neighbourhoods can make parts of our city feel unrecognizable within the span of a few years. With 10 years of rapid high-rise development behind us, low-rise streetscapes and vacant lots continue to give way to modern towers, as seemingly unending glass and steel condos re-make the urban landscape.

While it’s often difficult to tell one concrete skeleton or glass tower apart from another, Toronto’s condo landscape is deceptively diverse. With a large number of companies doing business in the city, understanding the different approaches taken by some of Toronto’s top developers reveals a significant degree of variety in the market.

Though architects, designers, and landscapers all play important roles in shaping the buildings rising throughout the city, it’s real estate developers—subject to the City’s approval process—who ultimately control what gets built where and how.

While no two developments are exactly alike, and large developers employ a range of architecture and design firms, each company nonetheless has a defining and generally recognizable modus operandi. Some developers specialize in specific types of projects—whether mid-rise or high-rise, luxury or affordable—while others tend to cluster buildings together in master-planned communities. The degree to which developers are committed to building cohesive, diverse, and vibrant communities also greatly varies.

In order to better understand the various approaches taken, we profiled some major developers to highlight the variety in Toronto’s market, and how they shape our city.

[WRITING] "Should Writing Be an Art or a Career?"

Sam Sacks' article in The New Republic made me think. I'll be thinking on it for some time.

There’s a very funny photograph taken by Brassaï of Pablo Picasso posing in his Paris studio. Picasso had acquired a giant oil painting of a nude woman from an antique shop, and he strikes an affected pose before it, his brush poised and his little finger extended, as though he’s preparing to make the finishing touch on a masterwork. The actor Jean Marais is stretched out on the floor beside him, pretending to serve as the model despite being fully dressed. The target of the joke is clear: Picasso was ridiculing the pretensions and conventions of the professional painter. “I am not a professional artist,” Brassaï recounts him repeating, “as if he were claiming innocence of a slander.”

The same question vexes literature, too: Is writing an art or a career, or can it be both? The Unprofessionals, the title of a new anthology of American writing from The Paris Review, defines itself against the emergence of a hyper-professionalized breed of fiction writer. In his preface to the anthology, editor Lorin Stein laments that a familiarity with social media has made young authors almost unthinkingly proficient as publicists for themselves and their friends. Even in M.F.A. programs, he argues, the tricks of self-promotion have been woven into the craft of writing, resulting in “less close reading, less real criticism, lower standards, and less regard for artistic, as opposed to commercial, success. … Young writers, in other words, were encouraged to think of themselves as professionals: to write long and network hard.”

Of course, the professionalization of writing has a long, and mostly respected, history. Writers as varied as Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, and Mary McCarthy would have been outraged to be called anything other than professionals, and when you push past Mark Twain’s most renowned books, you find a lot of writing that did little more than spin off from his celebrity. But today’s forms of authorial self-promotion often seem to depend upon a mastery of social media outreach—a talent only recently connected to the crafting of prose. Consider the extraliterary responsibilities expected of authors who have had their novels accepted for publication: Develop an active presence on Facebook and Twitter (and, for the truly motivated, on Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest); create an accompanying web site, video trailer, and soundtrack; go on a book tour, naturally, but also participate in a variety of reading series in anticipation of and well after the publication date; take part in panels and signings at book expos; give interviews to blogs and podcasts and write personal essays about your background, your development as a writer, and your process of creation; not only review other books but join the great merry-go-round of blurbing; perhaps you’ll even personally attend book clubs.

[LINK] "When Nothing Is Cool"

Facebook's David linked to Lisa Ruddick article in The Point critical of what she sees as the tendency in the academy--specifically, in the area of literature and literary studies--to kill the joy in the subject.

I actually think there's something to this. Reacquiring a love for literature after school has been a bit of a problem for me.

Let us assume a proposition that most American psychoanalysts would find uncontroversial, namely that human beings, unless autistic or seriously troubled, have inner lives—ideally rich ones—and a degree of self-cohesion. As students are brought into our profession, they typically learn to see this view as that of “mainstream psychology,” which in turn is fraught with bourgeois ideology. Their theoretical training, as a rule, gives them scant exposure to the many contemporary theories that validate the human potential for inwardness and psychic integrity.[3] Instead, they are assigned theories arguing, at an extreme, that the very border between inner and outer worlds is (as Judith Butler has argued) “maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.” They will also occasionally encounter work that uses the profession’s radical critique of interiority and autonomy to make the shattering of selves look edgy and progressive. I nowhere mean to suggest that the profession does not offer good criticisms of U.S. ideology. The problem is the scorn for self-cohesion that has wound itself in with the project of social critique.

As I have already intimated, an intellectual regime so designed discourages initiates from identifying with their own capacity for centered, integrated selfhood. Some will identify instead with the aggressor, turning against the soft “interiority” that the profession belittles. As a more moderate option, scholars can adopt a neutral historicist voice that allows them to handle the inner life—someone else’s—as a historical curiosity, without attributing value to it. (As one of my interviewees ruefully remarked, “You can write about anything so long as it is dead.”) Either way, the distanced attitude toward inwardness takes a toll.

The management scholar Ann Rippin, borrowing an image from a fairy tale, describes the “silver hands” with which organizations endow their members. Recruits to professional organizations, Rippin writes, are trained in glossy but dehumanized ways of speaking and feeling. The work they learn to do “is silver service done at arm’s length, hygienically, through a polished, highly wrought intermediary instrument.” In time, many of those so socialized “report feeling unable to bring their whole selves to work, [and] being obliged to dismember or disaggregate themselves, having to suspend feelings, ethics, values on occasion.” I think our profession has its own version of silver-handedness, exacerbated by theoretical orthodoxies that suggest we never had a “whole self” to lose in the first place. Nothing inherently makes the theories that dismiss the idea of integrated selfhood better than the alternatives; they are just preferred by this academic community.[4]

I believe that when a scholar traffics in antihumanist theories for purposes of professional advancement, his or her private self stands in the doorway, listening in. When it hears things that make it feel unwanted—for example, that it is a “Kantian” or “bourgeois” fantasy—it can go mute. I have spoken with many young academics who say that their theoretical training has left them benumbed. After a few years in the profession, they can hardly locate the part of themselves that can be moved by a poem or novel. It is as if their souls have gone into hiding, to await tenure or some other deliverance.

The poststructuralist critique of the self, though associated with progressive politics, has an unobserved, conservative effect on the lived world of the profession. It protects the institutional status quo by promoting the evacuation of selves into the group. In the story behind the story, the decentered subject is the practitioner who internalizes the distaste for the inner life and loses touch with the subjective reserves that could offset his or her merger with the profession. What is correspondingly strengthened is the cohesion of the collective. For our profession, alienated in various ways from the American mainstream, needs members who will band together. One way to get members to commit to the group and its ideology is to make them feel ashamed of the varied, private intuitions and desires that might diversify their interests.

Much more there.

[WRITING] What writing project would you like me to embark upon?

I tagged this as a [WRITING] post, but it is also tagged as a [FORUM] post.

If you had your druthers, what writing project would you like me to embark upon?